Our mapping IDX search makes it easy to capture leads with your real estate website. Users can search the MLS, register and receive daily emails with new and updated listings from the MLS IDX feed that match their criteria.

One of the primary reasons consumers are coming to your website is to search for homes. With our mapping IDX search, they can quickly and easily conduct a home search and it functions as a lead capture tool for you as the agent.

Once a visitor is on your IDX search page, you can customize your IDX registration form to prompt them to create an account after a certain number of searches and a certain number of detail listing views.

In addition, and as we discussed in an earlier post, you can also prompt the IDX registration form or an IDX login form to appear upon loading your IDX search page.

Once logged in, home buyers can favorite listings, save searches, update their contact information, add notes to their listings to serve as reminders or comments for later use and more. In addition, they can opt to receive IDX email alerts on new listings that match their search criteria.

Of course, to access these features, you’ll have to get site visitors to register first. Well, with our new Login & Registration icon sets you can quickly and easily add Calls To Action to your site to encourage site visitors to register to your IDX search (or login to their existing account).

Each button should link to one of those (either the login or the registration page). Once a user gets to the registration page, they’re prompted to create an account and yes, there’s a “Already have an account? Login!” prompt at the bottom of the page.

It was designed that way intentionally. It’s in case someone clicked on the registration form by accident. Otherwise, there’s a login button on the upper left of the IDX map search as you can see here: http://d.pr/aEiC.

You could try using widget logic (it’s a plugin). Then, set a conditional tag to have your widget removed from the actual search page. This way, they’ll see the buttons on every other page, just not the IDX page. So when they log-in, the buttons won’t be present to offer any confusion.

I have the widget logic plugin, but don’t follow you on its application here. I am displaying a “Why register?” link on all dsSearchAgent pages (I have lots of them) only, and want it to go away when the user is registered. I am displaying the link inside a text widget in a widget area. The text widget behavior can be controlled by the dynamic logic plugin.

Sorry, Jeff, there is no way for your dynamic logic plugin to know whether or not a user is logged in to the framed dsSearchAgent pages, as the log in status of a user does not modify the page URL or any other “signal” that your plugin could read.

The example we provided above is to add log-in and register buttons to your sidebar, then use the dynamic login plugin to only show those buttons on pages like your homepage, about page, and other content pages you create – – but disable those buttons from appearing in your sidebar on your “search.htm” page or any other page that has dsSearchAgent framed on. This will ensure users will only see your login/register buttons on non-IDX pages.

Thanks Robert, I have more completely planned the call to action and am doing just about what you suggest.

Since my post, I have come up with a great solution for custom search pages. The link at the top that offers to register or login only displays when the visitor is not logged in. At the end of the words “save listings and more.”, I want it to further read after the period “Why register?” which would entirely be a clickable link to a page on my site, explaining why they should register in great detail. Since this whole line does not display when they are signed in, I would not bother visitors with a call to action when they were logged in.

I believe this can be done via custom php without editing the plugin files, I am seeking advice there.

Can you explain the custom php to do this?

In the mean time, where in the plugin will I find this login/register line?

Thanks.

Robert Larson
on April 10, 2013 at 10:17 am

I’m not sure I’m understanding you, but we don’t offer any way for a dsSearchAgent framed IDX page to talk to your page/other plugins at all. We have two IDX products – dsSearchAgent (the mapping IDX you can iframe on your site) and dsIDXpress (the WordPress IDX plugin that you install on your domain).

Both of these products have cool features that allow you to load an IDX page with a login or registration prompt already open, so this post was all about how you could create buttons (or links) that take advantage of that feature with dsSearchAgent.

If you have dsSearchAgent framed on a page of your site, such as this URL:
…/mysearchpage.htm
– and you wanted to add a button somewhere (such as your homepage or an email) that will link to your search page and load the login screen, you can simply modify the URL a bit:
…/mysearchpage.htm/#Show Login
– and it will load your search page with the login screen open.

That’s really where the functionality ends – – there is no additional customization of PHP, lines of code you can edit, API to access, or other cool tricks you can use that are at all related to logging in to dsSearchAgent (or dsIDXpress, for that matter.)

If you’re a pro, you may be able to hack a way to test whether a user is logged in or not, and then display code/links/whatever based on that response – – but it’s not something we provide any kind of product support for, so it’s something you’d be doing on your own.

I hope this helps. Feel free to email [email protected] for additional help – they can forward your email(s) to me if need be.

Thanks

Jeff_Dodson
on April 11, 2013 at 7:41 am

I’ll take this further elsewhere as it has gone way beyond the original scope of this blog post.